Unusual King Vidor film for its day in that it manages to eschew the usual clichés of the usual “forbidden love” romances and is surprisingly and refreshingly adult. A novelist (a particularly charmless Gary Cooper) has a horrible case of writers block so he and his wife (Helen Vinson in the film’s best performance) leave Manhattan for the rural Connecticut countryside near a community of Polish immigrants. The community, in particular a young girl (Anna Sten), gives Cooper inspiration for his next novel while his bored wife goes back to New York. Inevitably, they fall in love but the film doesn’t go where you think it’s going to go and avoids the usual clichés about adultery. Sten is quite appealing but Samuel Goldwyn’s attempt into make a her major Star flopped every bit as much as her films. Pity, she’s likable and talented. The most interesting character is Vinson’s wife, who’s witty and nice and who acknowledges the other woman but won’t give him up because she loves him rather being vindictive which would make it so much easier to dislike her. With Ralph Bellamy as Sten’s brute of a fiancé, Walter Brennan, Esther Dale and Sig Ruman.
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